Wesley's Tool-Box

Shooting photos of the celestrial objects in a big city come with lots of limitations. Two most notable hindrances are the skyline and light pollution. Tall buildings outright block the view of the lower parts of the sky, while the light pollution makes the sky fuzzy and make it hard to see dim stars, especially near the horizon.

Of course, I'm willing to put up with that. Lots of trial and errors taught me how far I can get away with it. But that's all about static conditions. Weather is dynamic. Not all days are clear. Clouds come and go. So I check the weather forecast and decide when to prepare for a shoot.

But now there's another thing that's throwing a wrench into my observation, and that is this yellow smog that's been coming in for a couple of weeks so far. Even on a clear day, the smog dissipates urban lighting in the sky and compound the light pollution. It's bad for breathing and bad for observation. I hope it clears up soon.

There have been some network issues in the last few days. The major culprit turned out to be the 100Mbps Ethernet hub I've been using for more than five years (NEXT-8305SH). It doesn't "switch" the network connection over the ports properly anymore.

That has now been replaced with a ipTIME H5005 Gigabit Ethernet hub. I don't think the internet connection is that fast yet, but it's better to futureproof things. However, I've been noticing that the connection to the server is lost after some idling time after the new hub has been put into place. I'm not sure what's causing this and am trying to find out now.

Today marks the return of The Toon-Box, the comic that ran for four years from August 23, 2005 to July 29, 2009 and went into hiatus for more than four years since. With Comic Life software that made the comic possible available on iOS for some time, all it needed was motivation to resurrect the comic.

So yes, now the comic is fully created on my iPhone, and uploaded to the server. No need work on my Mac, since the photos are already on the iPhone anyway. Enjoy!